Hey all, quick question, because I find this kind of interesting: in your opinion, how infallible is the Foundation? You know - how often do they make mistakes, how unfeeling are the staff, how perfect are they at maintaining the masquerade?

The Foundation is absolutely fallible. Objects breach containment all the time, most of the "don't do this" in containment is the result of the latest researcher's cause of death, and the only staff that you could describe as "unfeeling" are Gears and the AI constructs.

As to the maintenance of the Masquerade, what do you think amnestics are for?

Humans aren't perfect, and by nature neither are their organizations. Still, some organizations are more competent than others, and I'm personally of the view that the Foundation is an exceptionally effective organization, albeit still imperfect.

It's a back-rationalization, really, because one of the main thematic elements of writing here is that outwardly, the world is a rational, understandable place. But in reality, it's founded on complete madness, to the point that humanity would lose faith in pretty much everything if they knew the whole truth. So, in order for there to even be a world, the Foundation must by definition be succeeding in its job (barring some stuff like the Broken Masquerade or Rats Nest or Unfounded canons).

The staff are people, and people are all different. The Foundation will definitely select for a person that is educated, skilled in multiple disciplines, and psychologically resilient, but even within this subset of people there will be great variance. I doubt any of the people that work in such an organization would be generally unfeeling; even in professions that we like to think of as encouraging numbness to violence and suffering, the folks that perform those duties definitely are affected by their work. As numerous combat vets, trauma nurses, animal control technicians, social workers, etc. etc. could attest.

In what I have dubbed the MacCanon, which is the center-stage for every skip I write (even if I don't show it too well), the Foundation is absolutely one of the most competent, infallible organizations on the planet. Not infallible, just more infallible than many comparable institutions. People die, skips get loose, money and resources get wasted, bad things happen. No organization with any missions comparable to the Foundation's can make any claims to perfection, besides maybe in a few select fields, and the Foundation is still made of people.

Think back to pretty much any spacelift accident (like the Challenger explosion): People whose entire careers revolved around ensuring those rockets would do their job and deliver their payload safely fucked up. These weren't idiots, or people with a lot of hubris or too much ambition. A few flaws in institutional culture, a few slip-ups, and now seven people are dead and a rocket that costed hundreds of millions of dollars is scattered over half the continental United States. The Foundation's mission and its screw-ups are similar. People with high-stress jobs tend to have higher anxiety levels and otherwise suffer because of the stress of their jobs; this can lead to mistakes that seem avoidable.

However, in spite of all of this, the Foundation has three missions it can't afford to fail, and has a massive resource pool to ensure those missions are accomplished. In order of least-to-greatest priority, the Foundation's missions are 1) keep the existence of anomalies secret, 2) study anomalies and understand them to the point that they can no longer be considered 'anomalous,' and 3) protect the public from the anomalies that could potentially hurt them en masse. The Foundation has succeeded in all three so far (giving the caveat for alternative interpretations, like Kalinin mentioned). Considering the fact that they're contesting entities that can veritably be called 'Gods' and forces that are much weirder and much stronger, I'd say they'd have to be pretty damn competent, by default.